postmaster.pid file

Hi Everybody,

I experienced something a bit strange.
When I issued, on a linux machine, the following
command as user postgres:
~/bin/pg_ctl -D ~/bin reload
It wasn't happy. The complaint was:
pg_ctl: PID file "/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster.pid" does not exist
Is server running?

Upon checking, I discovered that the file postmaster.pid was
in data directory and as I copied it into ~/bin directory (and
changed the ownership and permission appropriately), it sent
the HUP signal to the server process and all was well. I am
sure I have issued this command before and never had problems
like today.

Question 1:
What happened?
Did I do the right thing? If not, please tell me what I
should've and could've done.

Question 2:
As I looked at the pid file, there were three lines. The
first line seemed like the pid of the server process. The
second line indicates where the database cluster resides.
In my case it is /usr/local/pgsql/data. The last line has
two numbers. In my case they are: 5432001 and 131072.
What do they represent? I don't seem to have processes
by such id.

Thank you in advance.

Regards,

Tena Sakai
tsakai(at)gallo(dot)ucsf(dot)edu